Tracey Chadwell, a soprano of exceptional gifts and intelligence, died in her mid-thirties early in 1996 after a long, courageous and amazingly good-humoured battle with leukaemia. Nicola Lefanu, who contributes an affectionate note to this anthology of recordings from the BBC archives, was at her last concert, three weeks before her death, and says that “she looked and sounded ravishing”. In my experience she always did, and apart from its value as a memorial to a much loved and deeply missed artist and as a collection of fine songs (many of them written for her), this pair of discs could stand as a model to other singers in the expert management of a voice, in fearless vocal resource and joyful adventurousness in choice of repertory.
She had admirable taste: there is no music here that needs special pleading, and her advocacy of all of it is compelling. Most of it is unfamiliar, much of it not recorded before, so all I can do is single out a few particular pleasures that you might care to sample. Lefanu’s haunting, intimate and subtle I am Bread easily sustaining its seven-minute duration, not least because of Chadwell’s care over line and florid detail. The elegant talent of David Farquhar, making a simple but memorable thing of Sir Philip Sidney’s “My true love hath my heart and I have his”. The strong drama and toughly strong melody of Gillian Whitehead’s Awe Herea, using texts in Maori and English, and making huge demands of the singer’s technique as well as her imagination. Richard Rodney Bennett’s beautiful settings of the poems of a child who died at eight years old (Chadwell’s tender line in “Sweet Isabell” is deeply moving here). The big, striking gestures of John Joubert’s fine short cycle. The wonderfully pure tone and limpid line that the singer brings to Elizabeth Maconchy’s Thomas Traherne settings reminded me of an occasion when, during a competition at which I was a judge, I mildly warned Tracey Chadwell against overusing her beautifully floated high notes. At the final, with an irresistible grin in my direction, she took not the slightest notice, and she was quite right. She was an adorable singer, and I hope these records will be widely heard. Pamela Lidiard, her regular accompanist, is an ideally sensitive partner and the recordings are excellent, though once or twice I thought the voice a little recessed.'